CANNES – Call it digital déjà vu. The global convergence of television and video that has set off a wave of consolidation and new market entrants in the United States first began to emerge in Europe about two years ago.
Fast-forward and you had deals like NBC and Comcast and now the pending acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, flanked by the emergence of Amazon, Facebook and Google as video disruptors.
“All of a sudden, the U.S. really woke up as it became apparent that audiences were fragmenting and ratings were declining, especially among some key audiences,” recalls Ryan Jamboretz, CRO of TV and video software provider Videology.
This awakening has forced traditional cable companies and MVPD’s to face the reality of “competition from old foes, people in their own competitive set, and these kind of new barbarians at the gate,” Jamboretz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions gathering, where he was a panelist on the Advanced TV Summit.
Previously, companies needed only be proficient at distributing other peoples’ content or creating it. “Now they’re having to become both. If not become experts at monetization within that as well,” Jamboretz says.
As a “pretty global company,” Videology had a ringside seat to “bleeding-edge stuff on TV and video combining” as the result of its work with pioneers like Sky TV.
In the U.S., it’s companies like AT&T that “are really the ones we’re seeing with most of the innovation,” says Jamboretz.
Videology never sought to be a “jack-of-all-trades” in the digital arena. “For us it’s been a wonderful kind of awakening of the industry over the last two or three years as this challenge of how do we tackle TV turning digital has now kind of hit on all fronts,” he says.
One of the company’s keys to success is that it’s still privately held. “We have the luxury of not having to kind of expose all our state secrets, and I think we have every intent to keep doing that.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
